In the absense of a proper update I am posting these pics I took while I was in Tokyo. I will make a proper album as I usually do when I get back to the UK. In the meantime you can find them by clicking on the following links: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [7] [9] [19] and a pic of me in Santa Monica at the Pier [30]
I will update soon with news of the conference.
panos on 05.22.06 @ 02:33 PM gmt [link]
I arrived in California from Tokyo yesterday at noon. I took the Monday evening flight from Narita. Having enjoyed Monday the 15th in Tokyo I got the chance of re-living it again here in California. I really enjoyed the flying experience as for the first time in all my travels, I had broadband internet available on board the airline. It was really good fun and time "flew" quickly. I have to find out how they actually do it.
The reason for being here is that I will be attending and giving a talk at a security conference.
I am currently experiencing some problems with the website. It has been under denial of service attack since I left the UK and there is not much I can do from here. It should work if you retry a couple of times. I also took the comments functionality off for the time too..regards
panos on 05.16.06 @ 05:51 PM gmt [link]
The GGF meeting came to an end yesterday and today was the end of the GRID World meeting that was co-hosted. I attended all GGF sessions that were related to requirements engineering, security and databases. The general impression I was left with is that the Grid community is still trying to derive requirements in an attempt to scope what we call GRID computing. The driving force behind this process are the end users and their experiences in their respective applications.
As such there were a lot of discussions on how to sustain links with end users and continually refine middlware requirements. Several people presented requirements that had been derived from various data intensive application domains such as astrophysics, pointing out that security requirements are still surfacing. GOLD went down the same route of investigating a particular domain and using those results in order to scope our software solutions and further more generalise them. One of the conclusions I drew from this meeting is that as it turns out, the process of using domain specific use cases to derive generic requirements is inadequate. This is not to say that the process is totally wrong but it is not capable of producing a generic view which is what GGF people aim for, specially as a way of developing standards. I guess I am guilty of believing that to an extend.
Addressing accountability, privacy and at the same time data integrity is something that was discussed a lot. The usage of certificates came into question. One of the things that became clear to us at the GOLD project since the early days is that in order to deal with such issues, is to really understand what the trade offs are. We always pushed the idea of a flexible middleware platform where such issues are decided by the application and not by the middleware provider. There was a talk where the authors went back to ideas that were considered dead and burried, such as identity based cryptography keys as a way to deal with both issues of accountability and data integrity. That was not of course well received. It is important to understand that middleware cannot possibly dictate a solution for all these issues to the application. It is the application (i.e. end users ) that have to decide on a middleware solution that best suits their needs, moving at the same time (as my ph.d. supervisor used to teach me) the responsibility boundary from the vendor to the application.
In the area of security I was pleased to see some initiative in areas such as intrusion tolerance and intrusion detection. I came across this idea s few years back but nothing much had actually happended. Again as I said earlier the requirements for an initial model to address these issues was derived by experiences with dealing with hackers, data and identity theft.
OGSA DAI 2.2 was also presented. According to the developers this new installment supports several open source servers. I also found out a few things about the work at Manchester and in particular the DAIS (Database Access and Integration Services) working group. Some of the work on creating transparent platform independent interfaces to database resources is very exciting. I spoke extensively about this with my Manchester colleagues and I think the GOLD information management work could benefit from it. I definately think that GOLD should have kept in touch with GGF and I will urge my collegues to make an effort to attend future meetings. I am giving a talk at the university of Berkeley end of next week and I will now try to amend my slides to reflect my GGF experience. Will update again soon...
panos on 05.13.06 @ 09:28 AM gmt [link]
As I said in earlier posts, I am currently attending the Global Grid Forum meeting in Tokyo. I am hoping to make some good contacts and meet various collagues at the security session tommorow. Tokyo gives the same impression as any other big western city although having said that it is probably a lot bigger. The airport in situated in Narita, about 70 kilometers outside Tokyo and believe me the last thing one wants to do after a 12 hour flight in ride on the train. But it is just about the quickest way into Tokyo. So an hour`s train journey, and a brief subway ride later I found myself in the centre of Shinagawa, where my hotel was located. I checked in around 14:30 and immediately started work. I have to try to make the most of it since I am not staying here that many days. Went for a meal earlier this evening to a Greek owned restaurant (the only one) here in Tokyo. I was rather surprised that a real Greek restaurant would be here, and it was good quality too. I will update again on Friday with some technical info about the Forum and later on I will post about my impressions of Tokyo. I will now go back to battling my jetlag induced insomia. btw, I did find the region of Tokyo where all the cheap electronics stuff are so I will try to pay a visit there too at some point. The people that asked me to buy them electronic equipment need not worry.
panos on 05.10.06 @ 07:10 PM gmt [link]
On friday morning it was really rounding up to go down as a great week having met all my obligations prior to embarking on my Tokyo trip, as well as convincing my boss to extend the duration of my trip. Unfortunately at around 12:00 I got news from the dealer that my car will cost upwards of 600pounds to diagnose and fix! Needless to say that I totally freaked out. So now, in addition to all travel preparations I have to pay the dealer a visit and flex my negotiation skills which in the past have failed miserably. I have a few little things to do such as getting currency for Tokyo, getting a new pair of glasses, submitting my AHM paper and finishing off a set of slides that I have been working on. I was hoping for a relaxing weekend but the idea now seems dead and burried. Still I Dr Who to look forward to tonight and the visit at the football game tommorow. I will be here all day on Monday the 8th. Im travelling down to london on the morning of the 9th. Anyway I better go because I'm parked on double yellow lines again. I will update again with news from my trip.
panos on 05.06.06 @ 09:23 AM gmt [link]
I was pleased to find out earlier today that my paper "Security for Grid Application" has been accepted for the IEEE International Symposium on Security & Privacy which takes place in Oakland, California. I am particularly happy that for the first time in my career I will be visiting University of California at Berkeley and catch up with some collegues I met in various conferences throughout my career. This really cheered me up. I enjoyed a fairly laid back weekend but I have a quite busy schedule coming this week given the upcoming deadline of the AHM2006 conference. The GOLD team will be proudly submitting 5 papers in various topics on GRID computing. I owe phonecalls to a few people, but I will catch up with those in the forthcoming 3-4 days.
panos on 05.01.06 @ 09:30 PM gmt [link]
